Fly-in: Skiplagged, The app that beats U.S. Airlines

Go get it. skiplagged flight application experience a meteoric success in recent weeks. The web/app offers users, unlike their American nature, not to fly by the book, and to order follow-up flights on routes they do not intend to fly to save money.

United Airlines have even sued the 22-year-old founder which finally rejected by the court. The creator of the site, by the way, not only does not hide the fact that he was sued but proud of it on his front page.

Skiplagged’s users are so loyal to the service that when Zaman was sued by United and Orbitz, he opened a page in Kickstarter to finance legal expenses – and easily collected $ 80,000 from users who came to his aid to finance the site’s continued operations.

Here is the explanation for the phenomenon that allowed the application to grow: airline booking systems are consistently trying to fill “empty” flights to small cities. Therefore, in many cases, airlines drop intermediate flights to customers so that they choose to fly with them and fill the flight. As a result, flying from New York to San Jose, California, via Denver, Colorado, for example, would be cheaper than flying from New York to Colorado. From here, a passenger can ticket himself from New York to San Jose and just go down in Denver without going over the concrete – and pay less for that exact flight. Sound crazy? There is no doubt, and yet – this is a huge phenomenon.

The site’s founder and application, Aktarer Zaman of New York, founded it after trying to book a flight from Atlanta to Orlando and found that such a flight between two very close cities costs $ 250. He did market research and found to his surprise that flying from Atlanta to Dallas, Texas with a stop in Orlando costs about half the amount: $ 130. Zaman ordered this flight, and in Orlando, he just left the field without going on the next flight.

“There are some restrictions to this skiplagged’s method,” he explained recently in a television interview, “It is impossible to send a suitcase because it will go to the last destination on the flying card. You have to be smart and not declare lagged to the airline staff, so they will not try to charge you for the difference. Everything is legal, and everything works.”

Zaman has created a smart application that, in addition to searching for regular flights like other leading sites, is also looking for hidden connotations and “skip” options as described above, and offers them to customers.

According to reports, Americans saved millions of dollars last year by using a mechanism built by Zaman.

The airlines do not go crazy, to put it mildly, on the use of this site because it hits them twice: once when customers buy tickets for those flights but at a lower price than the proposed price, and secondly because flights that the companies try to fill in any way possible remain empty when the customers are not scratched.

They board the plane and are not counted as passengers on the line. It should be noted that in many of the lines serving small cities, the companies receive a government subsidy for passengers boarding the planes, in the name of initiatives to reduce access from the periphery to US business centers.

When the companies sell tickets for these flights but the seats remain empty, they can not receive the subsidy or sell the ticket to another passenger.

The companies threatened customers who use skiplagged for fines and revocation of points from their friends’ clubs, but it turned out that since the companies do not have the legal ability to “force” a passenger to board a flight he bought a ticket to which he does not want to use it.

In the meantime, the site celebrates the disagreements outside and enjoys a herd of fans who enjoy the cheap prices, and no less than that, a sense of satisfaction from the ability to “return” to local airlines.